Tweet This

I gave a guest lecture on entrepreneurship at Cornell Tech last week to a graduate class that included students from the law, business, and engineering schools. Toward the end, one of the students noted that I have been successful at "context-switching" in a career that has spanned theater, opera, strategy consulting, retail, K12 computer science education, and entrepreneurship across small tech startups, high-profile cultural nonprofits, and the world's largest enterprises. He asked what my secret was to moving seamlessly between roles, industries, and sectors.

Shutterstock

My answer was to end the "tyranny of jargon" (as I have taken to calling it on my podcast about people who work across multiple fields) and embrace the simplest language possible. Because my transitions weren't always so seamless: I had to learn this lesson the hard way.

I went to business school in part to transition out of opera and into something business-related. During the first-year recruiting process I was struggling to convince potential employers that a Rehearsal Associate from the Metropolitan Opera had any value to add to their consulting firms. I kept trying to describe my work in the jargon of the opera world. Then one day I was talking about what I actually did in my role at the Met to one of my friends who had come out of a manufacturing role, and she interrupted me, "oh, that's basically operations management."

A lightbulb went off for both of us and we went back through my resume and re-wrote it, translating what we could into the simplest language possible and in the places we couldn't, providing a business comparable in parentheses. We then practiced my interview answers, switching up the stories I told to highlight where I was most effective rather than telling the stories that seemed most accessible to a layperson. I ended up with three consulting offers that year.

Jargon is pervasive in all industries or ingroups, from the military to medicine to the Met. And I recognize that jargon can be useful — it affords an efficiency of communication and can convey precise technical meanings that have no other descriptor. But on the whole, it can be off-putting at best and exclusionary at worst, throwing up barriers against "outsiders," whether they are interested in joining the field or simply understanding it. And as the world is rapidly changing and the value of interdisciplinary innovation increases, it becomes ever more important to make our work accessible.

Think of words like currency: before the Euro became the standard currency of Europe travelers had to exchange their currency at every border, and each time there was a cost in both time and fees. But after the adoption of a common currency, tourism and commerce were able to flow seamlessly across borders, increasing the velocity and volume of both.

I'll be honest: simple language is much harder to use than jargon. As a professional storyteller with experience in branding and communications strategy, I've helped organizations move away from jargon-filled positioning language toward straightforward vernacular, and it can be an excruciating process.

But I discovered a secret in this work: every single time these organizations had a vast range in their understanding of their work, and their teams hid that misalignment behind jargon. Simple language leaves little opportunity for confusion, and that means much more effective — and authentic — communication.

I’m a multi-hyphenate with an interdisciplinary lens on life. I’ve started three major initiatives – founding a startup of my own (Quincy Apparel), opening a new office of an existing company (Startup Institute New York), and building a new division within a larger organizat...